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º June 4th-June 10th 2001
Sunday Portillo, Morocco
Saturday Dirty Duck, plus Toad
Friday Sense of resignation
Thursday Armchair voting
Wednesday Two tramps and a pigeon
Tuesday Rehi Karen
Monday More Closer
º Sunday 10th June 2001
I guess that most politicians have been too busy during the election to give much thought to their choice of destination for the well-earned holiday breaks that they're now embarked upon.
Even so, you'd think that someone reported to be worried about how his homosexual experiences will play in an upcoming leadership contest might have been a little more circumspect.
Michael Portillo has been on holiday. In Morocco.
º Saturday 9th June 2001
Pondering Chris Smith's position before yesterday's Cabinet re-shuffle, I had a glorious moment imagining him becoming some kind of Deputy Home Secretary with Special Responsibility for Gays.
How blind can you be? David Blunkett, our new Home Secretary, voted against equalising the gay age of consent to 16. And, apparently, he once wrote in Tribune: "There is no point in trying to delude myself that I feel anything but revulsion at the idea of touching another male."
Somehow, I don't imagine this ex-Education Secretary battling to abolish Section 28 any time soon.
What with the Election, Closer to Heaven and other nonsense this week, I seem to have taken a bit of a break from the usual obsessive catalogue of drinks taken, bars visited and men ogled.
But fear not: if I ever go into detox, you'll be the first to hear about it. (Actually, a Betty Ford Blog could be quite entertaining, don't you think?)
Aaaanyway, Monday was...hmmm, what did I do on Monday night? Oh yes, Monday was a last minute dash to Underwear Night at Substation South. Tuesday was...pop quiz, as mentioned. Wednesday: amateur strip at the White Swan, dull. Thursday, a low-key bar crawl as documented by David.
Last night I came home from work, had a quick bath, and walked up to the White Swan. A usefully aerobic walk, in fact, partly because I needed some exercise, and partly because I needed to get there before 2am.
At the weekends, the White Swan expands to become BJs, with three times the space and twice as many men. Or, rather, boys.
(The Swan somehow falls just this side of some psycho-geographical border control point: quaint twenty-somethings from Essex seem to make it thus far and no further, as if to go one venue further into town would tip them over a precipice into the, omigod, West End. Perhaps they think this is the West End.)
I think of going there at the weekend as a sort of character-building penance, somewhat akin to light flagellation or putting on a freshly ironed hair-shirt.
The look is not so much fluffy as plushy: that kind of saliva-stained scraggy look that a soft-toy gets after it's been worried by the family dog for several hours.
Last night's quintessentially naff encounter was bumping into a plump drug dealer that I've seen around the East End for years now.
I always cringe because I always know exactly how it's going to go: he's going to hug and squeeze me for about a minute, then he's going to stand back and stare at me and say "You remember me, don't you?", then I'm going to stand there staring at him whilst desperately trying to think of some light conversational interlude that doesn't involve enquiring if he still lives in Southend.
Last night he looked a bit different: he's grown a patchy mousy beard thing and done something to his hair to make it look as if he's wearing a really really bad blond toupée.
Extricating myself from his embrace, I whimpered "You've changed your hair," and he replied "Yeah, well, I'm working the clubs now an' you hafta look trendy, doncher?" Hmmmmm.
Part of my rationale for going to The Swan last night (rather than, say, The Spiral) was that I'm feeling slightly poor and didn't fancy shelling out a couple of fivers on a return cab fare. The other reason was that I had a vague memory of Dame Edna being scheduled to do cabaret at some stage of the evening, and it's always interesting to see her/him beyond her/his home turf at the Vauxhall Tavern.
Supping my second pint at around 2:30, reconciled to the fact that I'd got there way too late for any cabaret (any official cabaret), I spotted Edna - or rather Jonathan, strictly speaking, since he was ex-persona by this stage.
He laughed off my apology, saying I'd see it all again on Sunday anyway, and went back to snogging the tall personable stranger next to him.
I rather wish I'd congratulated him for finding an intelligent life-form.
The battle to be Hague's successor as leader of the thoroughly washed up Conservative party gives the Tories a chance to get back to what they're really good at: urbane character assassination.
It's all going to be thoroughly entertaining, in a Wind in the Willows kind of way: a battle between the toad Widdecombe, the fox Portillo, and... what's Kenneth Clarke? A portly squirrel, perhaps.
As to unknowns David Davis and Iain Duncan Smith, I'm reminded of nothing so much as a mouse and a rat.
º Friday 8th June 2001
Did you just see the pictures of Tony Blair with his one year old child outside Number Ten?
Is it just me, or does young Leo look remarkably like William Hague?
How marvellous to see at least one miserable, isolated individual heading straight for the dustheap of history. And so promptly too.
No chance of Widdecombe resigning at the same time, I suppose?
º Thursday 7th June 2001
If you're not able to vote this lunchtime, the polling stations should still be open this evening.
Journalists spend an extraordinary amount of time paring the information in their copy down to the bare minimum, especially in the all-important lead paragraph. So spot the interesting bit in this, the first par of a Daily Telegraph story today:
The entertainer Michael Barrymore was arrested over suspected drug offences yesterday following the drowning of a guest in the entertainer's swimming pool during an all-night party in March.
'March' is quite interesting; is it there to suggest the decadence of a heated pool?
And the word 'homosexual' is conspicuous by its absence, given the the Telegraph's notorious anti-gay attitudes. (Barrymore famously outed himself several years ago. At The White Swan, as it happens.)
But my favourite adjective here is 'all-night' - in the shires, you see, people sometimes get home from a party before midnight. Sweet, really.
Did you vote yet? Go on - you know you want to.
Are you sitting comfortably? The Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance System logs accidents reported by people admitted to a sample group of hospitals and then extrapolates them to provide the following country-wide estimates:
Armchairs 16,662
Vegetables 13,132
Wellington boots 5,615
Chainsaws 1,207
Sponges and loofahs 966
Rat or mouse poison 439
Birdbaths 311
Tea cosies 37
If you have a vote today, please use it.
Even better, use it to echo Trotsky to his conservative opponents in 1917 and say to the party that gave you Clause 28, Anne Widdecombe and Jeffrey Archer (all together now):
"You are miserable, isolated individuals.
"You are bankrupt. You have played out your role.
"Go where you belong: to the dustheap of history"
º Wednesday 6th June 2001
Patrick Lilley (promoter of 'Queer Nation') hosts an on-line radio discussion with Amy Lamé (Duckie promoter inc. "Lesbian Shame & Gay Weakness") and Jason Pollock (Director of the Mardi Gras Festival) this afternoon at Queer Company.
(I don't know how long Jason has been in charge of the Festival, but it explains a lot; I used to know him when he was a PR hack for TV AM.)
We lost at the pop-quiz last night (despite my potentially award-winning point) but it was worth it to see David stick his bottom lip out in a sulk, and hear Jonathan say: "Ooh look - you could get two tramps and a pigeon on that!"
º Tuesday 5th June 2001
"This is a family site; safe fun for all - which features no nudity, just buttcracks in amazing places..." Butts Across America.
The Barbelith Webzine republishes "Karen Elliott's" 1999 piece about Situationism. It was good then, and it's good now.
("Karen Elliott" - spellings vary - is a "multiple-name" invented by Situationists as a pseudonym for use by anybody who wishes not to claim personal responsibility for an art-work.)
If, and it's an attractive thought, the recent events in Nepal had transpired at Sandringham rather than in Khathmanhu, we would now have a King William. Now that is an attractive thought.
º Monday 4th June 2001
And still they come: three more reviews of Closer to Heaven, one pro, two anti:
"...This West End venture is an excruciating failure... a book cobbled together by Jonathan Harvey... Ironically, the Pet Shop Boys seem to ignore the message of their own closing number where Dave croons in praise of reinventing oneself. Closer to Heaven is a near-criminal case of hash and re-hash... The lyrics are so banal that muddy amplification is a mercy... Keating, supposedly a lust-magnet, is a lacklustre non-entity. Others are charmless cartoons... such tat inspires only profound gloom." - Kate Bassett, writing in the Sunday Independent.
"The West End deserves Closer to Heaven... In collaborating on the show, the Pet Shop Boys (music and lyrics) and Jonathan Harvey (script) aimed to provide an antidote to the sentiment and elephantiasis that have sapped the modern musical. It's true that Closer to Heaven is small, loud, thrumming and gay. But it's in the way it mixes talent and tosh that it really inverts convention. It delivers its tat with fervour, and its giftedness lightly: the music is better, the rhymes sharper than most of what cruises round the West End. It's essence of camp." - Susannah Clapp, writing in the Observer (Thanks David.)
"...tawdry costumes and dance routines choreographed by someone who watched the first five minutes of 'The Rocky Horror Show' then went blind... written by Jonathan Harvey, a man who thinks he's a 21st century Joe Orton, but is in actual fact a man who'd have been kicked off the 'Carry On' movies for being "a bit obvious"... exists in a bizarre bad-'70s-sitcom vacuum of limp-wristed gay men, working-class bits of rough, past-it druggy slags and grasping wannabes... leaves narrative strands dangling at the end like winnits from bum hair, to coin a Harvey-esque phrase." - Christian Ward, writing in the NME (Thanks David.)
Coleridge famously remarked that seeing Edmund Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. My weekend wasn't as remotely exciting as that, but I have been sitting here having little flashbacks:
- like, listening to gaggle of skinheaded queens sitting on the grass discussing which house they'd belong to at Harry Potter's Hogwarts. (Slytherin was predictably popular.)
- like, watching someone I tongue-swellingly fancied leave the bar and hearing his friend tell me that "He's a sexaholic. And he has a sugar-daddy. Are you rich?" At which I counted the loose-change in my pocket and we decided that, for £3.80, I might get the grandmother thrown in as well.
- like, watching a vanload of policemen draw up right outside the Vauxhall Tavern, sit there surveying the massed ranks for a while, and then decide to go away and find someone else's liberty to interfere with.
- like, realising towards the end of the evening that two of my good friends have been At It without even dropping me the slightest hint, the bastards. (You know who you are.)
You see, we're the nerds, the geeks, the dweebs: the men and women who can spend 20 hours straight contemplating 600 bytes of obscure, arcane, impenetrable computer code, only to break for cola and a pizza before spending 40 hours contemplating yet another 600 bytes of obscure, arcane, impenetrable computer code.
And we have been living in a paradise of affirmation. In school, we were the meek, the shunned, the clueless, the kids with no social life or social status. We preserved our virginity long after our peers, and not usually because we wanted to be pure.
But in the last decade, we emerged as the Drivers of the New Economy, an élite if often ill-dressed and sometimes unfragrant group. We've probably created more wealth out of thin air than anybody, at any time in history.
The real geniuses are information workers, people who create things out of bits: and bits are nothing but order imposed by sheer will.
Today's (sadly not on-line) column by Chris Gulker writing in The Independent.
My continuing-muddled sleep-patterns are throwing up some interesting mental phenomena as I grope my way from dream to wakefulness - I have these quite wonderful Bright Ideas that don't quite survive the harsh light of dawn but have a certain surreal splendour nonetheless.
This morning, some dream ended with a caricature Japanese businessman facing me across a table with his mobile phone extended: "You gimme number."
Now, presumably, as we get into the habit of beaming our phone numbers at each other without written intervention, protocols will evolve. And, presumably, Japanese protocol being what it is, this exchange of data will be hedged about with much bowing and nodding and rigorous examination of the transceived data. ("Ah, 702 - is very auspicious numbah!")
And, presumably, when one fills in the defaults on one's phone that will enable you to beam your details at all and sundry, there will be a space for an address.
All well and good for those of you who work for faceless corporations in giant cloudscrapers. But what about those of us who work from home, and are not particularly keen to divulge our home addresses?
Surely, I reasoned, it would be a severe breach of protocol to have to mumble "Forgive me, but I prefer not to give out my address..." So surely, I reasoned, there will be a need for dummy addresses, addresses that fulfil the obligation to offer data whilst being transparently fake.
"Noddy Motel, Noddytown" would do, but lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Ideally, the dummy address would involve some clever pun somehow based on the Japanese for 'untruth'. Or something...
And then, as I finally bobbed to the surface of full consciousness, I thought: Lie Inn.
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